Text: NEWTON'S THIRD LAW For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. In Maxwell's electrodynamics, Newton's third law is missing. It is missing because of the coarseness of the modeling which Maxwell was forced to use. Maxwell's seminal paper was read in 1864 and published in 1865. At the time, neither the electron nor the atom had been discovered, much less the nucleus of the atom. A molecule was just a blob with no structure. Electricity was considered to be a thin material fluid, flowing through the wires much like water through a pipe. In fact, Maxwell actually wrote a material fluid flow theory, since hydrodynamics was developed at the time. So there was, at the time, no notion of the Drude electron gas in a wire and the positively charged nuclei in the atoms in the wire. So there was no notion of two oppositely charged entities in the conductor, both reacting to any EM field entering from space and interacting with the wire. Further, Newton's third law had always been used mystically without any known cause. It was experimentally established that the reaction occurred, but scientists were forced to just assume its occurrence. Consequently, Maxwell wrote equations for the reaction of a unitary electric fluid in the conductors. He knew that the wire recoiled, but wrote no equations containing the cause of Newton's third law reaction. What really happens in the wire is that both the Drude electrons rearrange their positioning vis a vis the lattice, resulting in an apparent current. The actual movement (drift velocity) of the electrons down the wire is very slow, in a nominal case being a few inches per hour. The electrons, having spin, act as little gyros so to speak, longitudinally restrained by the repulsion of the electrons ahead. So the electrons precess laterally, and spend most of their movement in lateral precession movement. This alone proves that the perturbing force is longitudinal, as indeed does Whittaker's decomposition of the scalar potential into longitudinal EM waves. The gradient of the scalar potential (the E-field) is also such a decomposition. But the electron precession waves‹which is what our instruments measure in the wire‹are indeed lateral waves, in general consonance with Faraday's notion that the force field lines were physical and like taut strings. Maxwell merely assumed Faraday's notion, to give us the transverse EM wave in space. Consequently, the old electrodynamics envisioned that fluid vibrations (ether vibrations) from space had been intercepted by the wire to shake the electric fluid accordingly. And since that electric fluid obviously shook laterally, that "proved" that the waves in spacetime were lateral "plucked taut string" type waves. Actually it proved no such thing, because they were measuring electron precession waves. The positive nuclei usually have a m/q ratio several hundred thousand times the m/q ratio of an equal charge of electrons. Hence the massive nuclei also react to the field interaction, and move very slightly in the opposite sense from the electrons. That reaction is ignored in Maxwell's general equations, though when the equations are applied, they require that nuclei movement. In short, the electrons precess and the nuclei recoil oppositely, and that is the generation of Newton's third law reaction. When we excite a wire antenna with a wave excitation, we produce both electron precession waves and nuclear recoil waves in the nuclei. These two waves are of equal energy, though the nuclei waves are very highly damped in magnitude because of the high m/q ratio of the nuclei. Nonetheless, each of these "lateral" waves slaps the vacuum potential with identical energy. So two equal waves of spacetime curvature occur. It can be seen that the net vacuum wave is actually a longitudinal EM wave, composed of waves of vacuum (spacetime) energy rarefaction and densification. Electrodynamicists, considering the vacuum to be filled with a material ether, used the "effect" wave in matter as the cause wave. Hence they used a transverse EM wave in spacetime, when indeed the spacetime wave is and always was a longitudinal EM wave, just as Tesla insisted. Maxwell's equations are based primarily on the interaction of field and single charge. Actually, the reaction is always between the field and a dipole. Even when the field interacts with an "isolated charge", there are clustering virtual charges of opposite sign around the "isolated" charge so that the "isolated charge" is actually a set of composite dipoles, where each dipole consists of a virtual charge of opposite sign and a differential piece of the isolated observable charge. So the Newtonian third law reaction is also there with an isolated charge, but occurs in the vacuum itself, resulting in vacuum polarization. Nonetheless, the "transverse EM wave in vacuum" notion is so embedded in electrodynamics that we seem to be stuck with it. It means, however, that the "field in space" used in electrodynamics must be regarded as only a sort of "convenient transfer function" and not a real transverse oscillation entity. This of course accords with Feynman and Wheeler's pointing out that only the potential for the EM wave exists in space, in case a charge is brought in to interact with its gradients. And needless to say, since the vacuum is a big potential and only potentials and potential changes can exist in it, then Whittaker's 1903 paper decomposing the scalar potential into longitudinal EM waves is paramount and decisive. EM waves in the vacuum a priori must be longitudinal waves, because they are only the changes to the vacuum potential. And that potential at each and every point, changes and all, decomposes into longitudinal EM waves in 3-space with convergent longitudinal EM waves incoming from the time domain. http://www.cheniere.org/techpapers/Annotated%20Glossary.htm

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